“Covenant” Plummets At Box-Office

All the talk going into the Memorial Day holiday weekend box-office was about how well newcomers like the fifth “Pirates” and “Baywatch” will do. With Friday’s numbers in though, the real surprise is actually a holdover title – last week’s “Alien: Covenant”.

Ridley Scott’s sci-fi creature feature dropped a whopping 80% at the box office Friday-to-Friday on its second weekend – falling from a $15 million opening day to just $3 million yesterday. That follows on from a lower than expected $36 million domestic debut last weekend.

Should that rate hold through Saturday and Sunday, it would be one of the ten biggest second-week drops of all time. To be fair “Prometheus” dropped 73% on its second Friday back in 2012, but it also started from a higher $51 million opening weekend position.

Scott spoke with Collider recently and says there wasn’t much in the way of deleted scenes – around 15-20 minutes of the film didn’t make the theatrical cut with most of it being edits for pacing.

‘Covenant’ has made $136 million worldwide to date from a production budget of $97 million.